Air France-KLM

In its three businesses of passenger transportation, cargo transportation, and aircraft maintenance, Air France-KLM is a leading global player.

Air France-KLM

In its three businesses of passenger transportation, cargo transportation, and aircraft maintenance, Air France-KLM is a leading global player.

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We put our trust in TIBCO, and we realized our goals. We were able to integrate our main systems into one single system. With a SOA built on TIBCO products, we assembled the portfolio of services that are deployed today.

Alex de Hes

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Technical Architect, Air France-KLM Integration Team

Air France-KLM Flies High with TIBCO Integration

Reduces costs and ensures high-quality services into the future

Challenge

“The airline industry has changed a lot over the years,” explains Technical Architect Alex de Hes. “In the past, everything was done via sales agents and ticket offices, and now people do everything themselves online or on their mobile phone. From just transporting people, we’ve added services to notify customers when their flight will arrive and depart and other information. The mobile platform is one of the big changes.

“Air France and KLM merged about seven years ago. We had multiple reservation systems, legacy systems, commercial off-the-shelf systems, homemade systems. We needed an integration platform that would connect all these systems with their different technologies, different protocols, and different vendors so they would work together as one. We had to integrate all of them while we maintained service levels. We also had to do it fast and at low cost. Our systems have to work 24 by 7 and provide one seamless service to our passengers.

“If we could not solve our integration problem, we would not be able to deliver new functionalities, for example, provide a new distribution channel or deliver personalized services to our customers. What we really needed was a future-proof integration platform suitable for the needs we have today and those of the future.”

Solution

“We wanted to deploy a new service-oriented architecture and use web services to create a more standard way of communicating to the different backend systems,” continues Mr. de Hes. “We did extensive research and used Gartner, Forrester, and of course, all our own requirements. In the end, we found that TIBCO products were the best for our needs.

“We put our trust in TIBCO, and we realized our goals. We were able to integrate our main systems into one single system. With a service-oriented architecture built with TIBCO products, we assembled the portfolio of services that are deployed today.

“TIBCO Professional Services was a big help to us in setting up our architecture and also in creating an event broker, which we needed.”

Benefits

Reduced Costs

“Our service-oriented architecture built on TIBCO helped us standardize, which has lowered our costs,” says de Hes. “Many of our web services are reused now, which lowered the cost of application development. Otherwise, we would be duplicating a lot of code. By providing reusable services, you do not have to test them again, and your QA cycles become much shorter.”

High Quality Services

“The new architecture also provides better reliability and quality. During the migration to the single check-in system, no one noticed any change in service.”

Future

“Our next challenges are to integrate big data,” says de Hes. “It’s of vital importance for the business to do more analytics, either in real time or not. Cloud technology will help us deploy faster and shorten our time to market. So, we will migrate more to the cloud, develop more mobile services, and incorporate data from the Internet of Things, all using our existing integration platform.”